This is Part II of my Visualizing Time sequence—if you haven’t seen it already check out Part I. And in Part II we have a standoff across time with your primitive ancestors, decay and the hourglass, rewriting America’s racist past, the sundial as an arena for an epic showdown with an alien, jumping through cave paintings (a metaphor, a metaphor!), and various crumbling clocks and visualizations of the workings of time…

I have a soft spot for Sam and Miriam Smith’s cover for the 1965 edition of Asimov’s The End of Eternity (1955). Eternity, represented by a sequence of circles, literally drips from the page. Vincent Di Fate’s cover for the 1972 edition of Laumer’s Timetracks (1972) is simply off the wall bizarre—I mean, he’s fighting an alien on a sundial!

What are your favorites? Are the books any good?
Enjoy!

(Uncredited cover for the 1963 issue of Sands of Time (variant title: The Sands of Time), Peter Dagmar)

(Uncredited cover for the 1970s cover of Voyages in Time (1967), ed. Robert Silverberg)

Black in Time looks very promising and it’s certain the title divulges Jake’s destination with the plot as a kind of climactic deus ex machina. I’d love to read this book just to see just how lightly he tread on stereotypes by 70’s standards.

Speaking of Lem, I glanced across an anthology of short stories by authors (I believe it was all other than Lem himself) that are much in the vain of what Lem produced; quirky and psychedelic. I think there might be some exciting stories here:

Wow, I have not seen that edition of Key Out of Time by Andre Norton with the Ed Valigursky cover in many years! My grandfather picked up a handful of sci-fi books back in the 1960s, and this was one of them. I never did get around to reading this one, sadly. After my gradfather moved to Florida and then passed away, a lot of his possessions went into storage or were sold, including those old books. I eventually did end up finding a different edition of Key Out of Time several years ago… but I still have yet to read it. Too many books, too little time. But, wow, this really brought back memories. That cover by Valigursky is such an awesome image.

Late even for me, but… Another enjoyable collection. I’m glad the …QUIET SUN cover was included. I loved the book–the title of the third book I’ve got on Kindle is intentionally named as a kind of echo to that title–and have found several good covers for it, including one by the Dillons.